“It’s funny, says Iain Brown, “I had been an avid reader of the magazine for years when I was asked to take over the editor position from Jane Whaley, but until that very moment I had never thought of that being an option!” But, it happened.
It was 2020, the start of the pandemic, and it came at the right time. “I had just finished a consultancy job and the world came to a sudden stop. In such a situation, what is better than working from home and connecting to the world using modern technology to source content for a magazine?” asks Iain rhetorically.
“Being an editor really puts you in the driving seat as to what goes into the magazine, and it makes you communicate with an amazingly diverse group of people from potential writers to designers and marketing managers. Being an editor is surely not the worst job in times of a lockdown, at least if you are a person who likes speaking to people and finding out what they do”, laughs Iain.
“Making sure that authors were meeting their deadlines was probably the most stressful aspect of it all.”
It was a steep learning curve though. “Luckily, I enjoyed a very good handover from Jane, who had been doing the job for more than a decade. That helped a lot, but ultimately, from the day you start, it’s you being the focal point for all the contributing authors and other people involved in the production process. Making sure that authors were meeting their deadlines was probably the most stressful aspect of it all.”
“For me”, continues Iain, “it was a rather big change from working in a large multinational company with many people having dedicated task portfolios to a very small outfit where there is much more of a can-do-everything attitude. And that is surely what the very small GEO EXPRO team was about. But even though we were all in different places, communication was excellent and we all had the same goal of meeting those six deadlines a year.”
The editor may be the only person who reads the magazine from A to Z, more than once. “I particularly enjoyed learning about fascinating aspects of geology that I would never normally have come across. I remember an intriguing article about Lake Kivu in Africa’s Western Rift Valley and its associated resources and dangers as well as some great pieces on planetary geology”, says Iain.
“The magazine has evolved a fair bit since I left, and it does not offer so much of the broader geological topics anymore. I miss that to a certain extent, but at the same time I do like the new format with the returning sections and the fresher look is more visually appealing too.”
Since July 2022, Iain has been back in geophysical surveying business where he was before, but now focused on airborne rather than marine geophysics. “The airborne gravity gradiometry business is a huge growth area and the company is conducting more and more projects exploring for renewables such a geothermal resources, as well as minerals. At the same time, oil and gas remain an important business area too, with gas exploration only likely to grow as demand increases due to the transition.”
